Good Samaritan Society Canistota

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this place an A+ for the area of inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to this facility's list of accomplishments, it also was given a top-shelf long-term care score. We awarded them a dominant grade of A- in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 75.757576 percent of its residents. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing category analyzes several components, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient more often.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in this category. Unfortunately, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. It appears that this facility was below average in the two key staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.